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 A collective of educators and students engages in immersive art- and design-driven practice to reimagine higher-education and primary-school teaching and learning at, and beyond, the University of Teacher Education. 

Rooted in curiosity, care and attentiveness to diverse histories and voices, the collective offers open-ended impulses that anyone can adapt, question or extend across a growing constellation of educational hubs.

© 2025 Emerging Space Collective (CC BY‑NC 4.0)
Nora Bateson for the Re-Imagining Education Conference


In this talk, Nora Bateson explores the future of education as a deeply urgent and complex matter. She emphasizes that education cannot be understood in isolation from broader systems such as economy, family, identity, health, and technology. Drawing on the concept of transcontextuality, introduced by her father Gregory Bateson, she describes individuals and learning as shaped by multiple overlapping systems. Reducing education to isolated metrics or formal structures ignores the depth of these interconnections and oversimplifies the richness of human development.

Bateson critiques the current school model, which still mirrors factory logic and focuses on producing workers. She proposes an ecological approach instead, one that values uncertainty, creativity, and interdependence. Exercises like the Lifeboat dilemma are used to show how reductionist thinking can dehumanize and erase relational complexity. In contrast, education should support the emergence of new possibilities through mutual learning and shared presence. She describes how dominant systems often reinforce themselves in closed loops, creating what she calls a tautological trap. Institutions validate their own logics, making meaningful change difficult. 

To move forward, Bateson calls for a different kind of response — one grounded in relational awareness, creativity, humor, and unpredictability. Education, from this view, becomes a living system where learning is co-created rather than delivered. The goal is not to fix isolated problems but to foster new ways of seeing, being, and learning together, beyond what current models allow.